The Resilience of Julia Foyster
Article by Louisa Harvey
“Most people don’t realise there’s a story behind every meal, so we believe it’s important to raise awareness and understanding about the realities of farming.”
Julia Foyster surveys the neat rows of macadamia trees from her farmhouse veranda. “We kayaked over those trees in the 2022 floods,” says Julia, “Even the big macadamia trees were underwater.”
The way Julia paints it, you might think the floods were an irritating inconvenience to an otherwise ordinary week on the farm, rather than an inundation of epic proportions that cut off their access for three days. But she’s been through her share of weather disasters.
“Farming is like playing poker. You can have the best hand, and then out of nowhere, with no warning, you lose,” she says.
Julia lives with her husband Nathan and two children, Eve and Sam, on their four hundred and fifty acre farm in Mooball. It’s located in the Tweed Shire of Northern New South Wales. The property stretches to Wooyung Beach in the east and overlooks sugarcane fields to Wollumbin, Mt Warning, on the western side. Its rich, volcanic soil has provided fertile farming ground for the Foyster family for five generations.
As Julia approaches the office of her onsite farm business, Tweed Real Food, she kicks off her muddy boots at the door. Her staff are busy packing spice blends, salts, dukkah and vin- egar into mailing boxes.
Julia’s business is a culmination of all the diverse roles she has taken on over the years – as a farmer, a fruit picker, a marketing manager, and a mother. “One of the joys of being a farmer is wearing many hats,” says Julia. “One day we are food manu- facturers, the next, we are mechanics fixing the excavator.” It’s been a steep learning curve since arriving as a backpacker from Germany in 2010.
Julia first arrived at the Foyster’s Mutchilba property as a WWOOFER (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). Her job was to pick and pack avocados, limes and mangoes. “I spent hours destemming mangoes with sap shoot- ing over my face, working in the forty degree heat. The skin on my face would peel off,” says Julia. “But I fell in love with Nathan, the countryside and the Australian lifestyle,” she smiles.
The Foyster family farms span one thousand eight hundred and fifty acres, across five locations and two states. The family has farmed the Mooball property for a hundred and ten years, while the other properties were acquired over time to expand and diversify their crops.
Pretty Gully, a farm in the Tenterfield Shire an hour from their farmhouse, was their first addition, followed by Mutchilba and Arriga in Far North Queensland, both outside Mareeba. The most recent addition was an eight hundred and fifty acre farm in the Hogarth Range of northern New South Wales.
The family has grown everything from avocados to lychees, watermelons to potatoes. These pivots in direction have been dictated by weather, market value and labour over the gener- ations.
They’ve added dams, irrigation and nurseries. They’ve had to buy more equipment and machinery and acquire new skills quickly. “I was – and still am – in awe of my family’s dedica- tion, hard work and resilience,” says Julia.
Julia and Nathan’s honeymoon was spent harvesting avocados, and their first few years of marriage entailed much of the same. “I helped run the packing facility, drove tractors and other farm equipment, investigated new crops to grow and helped establish new orchards.”
When Julia’s children were born, she stopped travelling be- tween farms, but her intensive workload remained consistent. “My kids were either in a baby sling, their highchair or hang- ing in their Jolly Jumper from a beam in the packing shed so I could work,” says Julia.
Often, work continued into the night. “I would have my eyes glued on the baby monitor while the kids slept,” she recalls.
However, the most significant test of resilience came from a series of disastrous weather events. During the 2017 floods, as the family watched their read-to-harvest watermelons float out into the paddock, Julia experienced the severe emotional impact of natural disasters for the first time.
“Witnessing the destruction of our watermelon crop in Moob- all revealed what it truly meant to be married to an Australian farmer,” says Julia.
“No one talked about the financial impact or the emotion- al strain of losing all the hard work and time invested in the flooded crop – everyone just threw themselves into working even harder to make up for the loss.”
The Foysters went straight from floods into two years of drought.
A record yield of avocados was being kept alive by pumping water from the back of their truck – sourced from their near- dry bore and purchased water from other properties. Julia’s fa- ther-in-law drove the truck for more than ten hours daily, sev- en days a week, hauling between 100,000 and 150,000 litres.
“Every third tank of gas, we’d go through a set of tyres, shred- ding them on the rocks as we drove up the mountain,” Julia explains.
Julia recalls the day rain was forecast. “Every fifteen minutes, my husband updated the radar loop,” Julia explains.
And then the blue band of rain steadily tracking towards them turned black. “It was the feeling of utter defeat – again,” Julia says.
It was even worse than they had feared. Within ten minutes, the jagged, tennis ball-sized hailstones had destroyed four mil- lion avocados and severely damaged the orchard, affecting the following year’s harvest.
People offered to help Julia salvage some of the broken av- ocados, but because they were still three months away from harvest, “they ended up turning into very expensive mulch”.
The financial impact of years of weather-related disasters and the inherent unpredictability of farm life spurred Julia to start her own business. “I wanted to do more than just the back- packer work I had always done – more than just lending a hand and watching things unfold,” Julia explains.
Julia founded her business, Tweed Real Food, to provide au- tonomy within her family farming operation and even out their yearly income. It has been instrumental in helping them keep their family home and keep their animals alive.
When bushfires ravaged their Pretty Gully farm in January 2020, Julia’s business provided financial and emotional se- curity. Julia will never forget the agonising wait for news of her husband, his family, their friends and employees who had rushed to save their orchard and farm.
Julia’s only source of information was the New South Wales Rural Fire Service app, which indicated that fires had engulfed their property. She still has nightmares about it. “I thought my family didn’t make it,” she says. Everyone’s survival was a miracle and the emotional toll of the events was significant.
It was a life-changing experience that inspired Julia to advo- cate for the farmers in her network. “Most people don’t realise there’s a story behind every meal, so we believe it’s important to raise awareness and understanding about the realities of farming,” she says.
Julia uses Tweed Real Food as a platform to champion the efforts of Australian farmers, donating a percentage of sales to rural aid and disaster relief funds regularly.
She also mentors members of her local shire networking group, The Sourdough Business Women, where she shares her food manufacturing and farming knowledge.
“Mentoring is an important part of my life. I enjoy assisting other women in laying strong foundations for their business- es,” Julia says. “If someone is willing to put in the effort, they deserve all the help they can get.”
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